Overpaid welfare recipients may not have to reimburse state

Tuesday

Nov 29, 2011 at 12:01 AMNov 29, 2011 at 12:12 PM

Gov. John Kasich is weighing whether welfare recipients who were overpaid because of a government error should be asked to repay those benefits. "It's a decision under review," Kasich told The Dispatch yesterday. "We've got to see what's reasonable here. If you lay a $2,000 or $3,000 payment on someone who was overpaid nine or 10 years ago, I don't know if they've got the dollars to repay it.

Joe Vardon, The Columbus Dispatch

Gov. John Kasich is weighing whether welfare recipients who were overpaid because of a government error should be asked to repay those benefits.

“It’s a decision under review,” Kasich told The Dispatch yesterday. “We’ve got to see what’s reasonable here. If you lay a $2,000 or $3,000 payment on someone who was overpaid nine or 10 years ago, I don’t know if they’ve got the dollars to repay it.

“If the state has overpaid people and then it’s going to go back and punish people, I am not comfortable with that.”

Last week, Kasich ordered the Department of Job and Family Services to dump a policy enacted by the administration of former Gov. Ted Strickland in December to recoup benefit overpayments beyond 10 years, whether the overpayment occurred because of a failure to report a change in income on time, recipient fraud, or government error. Kasich decided the state would revert to its old policy, which was to recoup overpayments made within a 10-year window.

Kasich said yesterday the state would continue to pursue welfare recipients who fraudulently received extra benefits, regardless of the time since the fraud occurred. He also said recipients who were overpaid because they “failed to report new income” that would’ve changed their benefit levels also would be asked to repay if the overpayment happened within a 10-year window.

But Kasich was emphatic in saying that he opposes forcing welfare recipients to repay benefits they received through a government mistake. He wants to examine federal rules to ensure that the state could forgo recovering overpaid benefits made through government error, and he wants his staff to identify and prevent government mistakes in welfare cases.

“For the government to go back and then punish somebody they overpaid, that’s the ultimate bureaucratic blunder, and I wouldn’t favor that,” Kasich said during a news conference yesterday, discussing the decision he made last week.

Eugene King, director of the Ohio Poverty Law Center, and Gayle Channing Tenenbaum, co-chair for the Advocates for Ohio’s future, both praised Kasich for considering a change in state policy again.

King said to his knowledge there was no federal guideline that would require the state to collect overpayments caused by government error. But he added that the Kasich administration is wrong to seek repayment in cases in which a recipient didn’t report a status change before that month’s cash or food stamps assistance was awarded.

“That’s absurd; that’s not a recipient’s mistake,” King said. “I don’t think it’s an error on anyone’s part, but may be a glitch in the system.”

It’s possible that Kasich’s review of government mistakes could include the gray area in which recipients report status changes, and the governor also hinted that he was open to decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Ben Johnson, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, said that in an initial check of 100 random overpayment cases, 67 percent were because of a recipient not reporting a change in income or status, 14 percent stemmed from fraud, 2 percent were caused by a caseworker’s error, 9?percent were related to a recipient’s due-process rights, and 8?percent were unknown.

Johnson conceded that included in the 67 percent were recipients who reported a change in income but not before benefits for that particular month were paid, meaning he or she received a higher benefit.

Last year, the state extended its look-back policy beyond 10 years, demanding repayment of welfare overpayments made in error 25?years ago or longer. The move followed a 2008 change in federal policy for collecting food-stamp overpayments.

Kasich said he was unaware of the Strickland policy change until he read a Dispatch story on the letters being sent out earlier this month.

“When I saw that, I thought, this is crazy,” Kasich told The Dispatch. He said during his news conference that he was “very unhappy that we didn’t get ahead of this.”

Kasich said that some people had complied with the state’s request for repayment of a benefit paid more than 10 years ago, and those people would receive a refund.